16th February 2019 – As the best Christmas present ever – my friends and I made the drive down to Gloucester to see the one and only Ben Hobday! The clinic was amazing in a word. We saw Ben make a grand entrance himself to the classic ‘We Will Rock you’ getting us all the chat and clap as he came in which was fantastic from the beginning. He worked on horses Shadow Man, Wiz Kid, and Dillion.

He showed us several demonstrations of how to encourage horses to do something that they have never tried before, by just keeping the contact there and ‘holding their hand’ through the process. Another thing was to keep the question the same of what you are asking the horse to do, this way even though they may not fully understand the first time, they will come to understand in time.

With jumping Ben talked about how you must be able to ‘change through the gears’ of your horse before beginning jumping. By this he meant being able to change the pace in canter, still keeping the power and control. This way you can adjust the number of strides between fences by either lengthening or shortening the stride, allowing yourself room for the fence so that you don’t end up a stride too far out or too close.

He also mentioned when when approaching the fence you must look at the take off point, this way you will be able to train your eye to see the number of canter strides you have left before the fence. When you can see the strides, you can work out whether you need to hold back for half of a stride, or push forward. This way you can adjust the stride as you approach the fence. When I first heard all this I was really confused as I have never really been able to see a stride, and recently having been on multiple numbers of different horses it is difficult when they all have differing stride lengths. However, I did come up with a way of learning to ‘see’ the stride:

1. Set up your fence.
2. Make a line in the surface with your shoe two steps away from the fence, this is the takeoff point.
3. Walk four more steps away from this line, and draw another line. This is a canter stride.
4. Do the same again.

By doing this, when approaching the fence these lines in the surface shall become your targets. You can see the takeoff line and so make sure that you do aim to take off at that point. Ben says it’s the rider’s job to get the approach to the fence correctly, it is the horse’s job to jump it, you just have to make everything as easy as you can for them to do their bit properly. From this exercise, over time you will come to train your eye to see where the strides are, and this then allows you to know when to adjust the stride. I haven’t tried this out myself yet, but I plan too soon.

Ben then demonstrated the differences between his young horses and the older ones, showing how the training process comes to take effect, as with the younger horse Dillon it was a little trickier to quicken and slow down the canter than with expert Shadow Man. He also emphasised that the canter must be powerful, and that this must not be mistaken with speed. A horse needs power to get over the fence, often the harder the fence, the more power needed, and the important part is to maintain the power throughout all different paces of the canter.

At the end of the night Ben was even kind enough to stay behind and meet us all, the clinic didn’t finish until 10pm and we didn’t meet him until 11! He looked super tired yet still put the effort in to have a chat with us and have a photo – it is the most awkward looking photo ever – but it was still amazing to meet the man. According to his instagram story he didn’t get to bed until 6am but it was still an amazing night!